Drive past a Tea Party protest in the Inland Empire, and you'll see homemade signs decrying socialism, printouts of endlessly forwarded e-mails and lots of red-white-and-blue apparel.

But Tea Party members see themselves as much more than flag-waving anti-tax crusaders. They see themselves as educators, as distributors of truth.

Tea Party groups, which popped up in the Inland Empire and across the country this spring to protest taxation - and, more recently, health care reform - have been among the most vocal opponents of President Barack Obama's reform agenda.

As the health care debate rages in Washington, the Tea Party groups seem to be the only conservative answer to Organizing For America, the vast volunteer group pushing the president's agenda.

A key difference between OFA and the Inland Empire's various Tea Party organizations is that OFA is pushing for something, while the Tea Party groups are pushing against, said Dan Schnur, director of the Jesse M. Unruh Institute of Politics at USC.

That gives the Tea Party groups a leg up, Schnur said, because it's easier to motivate people to fight against something than for something.

"This has been part of the human condition ever since cavemen were fighting off saber-toothed tigers," he said. "We're much more motivated by threats."

Jack Pitney, a political science professor at Claremont McKenna College, said that's especially true in a fight over a complex and yet-to-be nailed-down issue like health care reform.

"The legislation keeps changing," Pitney said. "There isn't a single person who knows what the final bill is going to look like. It's kind of hard to rally people for a blank check."

Put another way, "Reconciling health care legislation between five congressional committees is a lot more complicated than `Yes we can,"' Schnur said.

Tactics

This week, OFA staged a nationwide event and got more than 300,000 people to call or commit to calling Congress in support of health care reform. California OFA Director Mary Jane Stevenson said the group wanted to focus on phone calls because they "didn't feel doing rallies would be the most effective."

But rallies are the Tea Party groups' bread and butter.

Lloyd Rekstad, who helped organize the Yucaipa Tea Party group, said his group plans to have events that aren't just protests - a Pearl Harbor anniversary event in December, for example. But he acknowledged that the Tea Parties are known almost exclusively for waving signs and opposing one thing or another.

"We're most visible in defensive mode," he said. "But we're the little guy. The big guy is government."

Because of their "little guy" role and what Rekstad and others see as unfair treatment by the press, Tea Party groups are much more likely to stage protests on street corners than to set up phone banks or start letter-writing campaigns.

"We are continuing to battle in that way because we feel like we're not being listened to," said Lane Schneider, organizer for the Redlands Tea Party. "We're making a big public statement. We are here and you can't ignore us."

That focus on rallies might be a key to the groups' long-term success.

"The most effective advocacy organizations in Washington or anywhere else are those that can put bodies in front of elected officials," said Schnur, who was communications director for John McCain's 2000 presidential campaign. "E-mails and phone calls are helpful, but they don't have nearly the impact that real live people do."

Methods

Perhaps a bigger difference between OFA and the Tea Party groups is not the kind of events they organize but the way they reach out.

Thursday evening, the Redlands Tea Party set up a booth on State Street during Redlands' weekly market night. They handed out pamphlets and copies of the U.S. Constitution and discussed their message with passers-by.

Their mission is more to educate than to spur action.

OFA volunteers say they try mostly to find like-minded people and get them to participate, but Tea Party members are more likely to try to change minds and then hope for participation.

"We go to the University of Redlands campus and debate students there," Rekstad said. "It's about saying, `Did you know this?' or `Do you want this?' ... We present them with facts and let them decide."

Rekstad said most Tea Party members distrust the media and feel they have to spread the truth about health care reform.

"I would like to say I helped people make a decision by giving them complete information," Schneider said. "What we're doing is informing and presenting these ideas."

Once they get their information out, the Tea Party groups ask for action - calling, writing or faxing a message to Congress. But, unlike OFA, they don't provide the means to do so immediately. That is, while OFA held a phone drive to ask passers-by to use their cell phones on the spot to call legislators, local Tea Party groups say they simply offer information and encourage people to get involved on their own.

"I want to make (involvement) easier for people too, but I also want to respect a person's individual conscience," Schneider said. "There's a line that I'm not going to go past."

National leadership

Although OFA takes its direction generally from the Obama administration and is part of the Democratic National Committee, the Tea Party groups have little if any top-down organization.

FreedomWorks, a conservative organization headed by former House Majority Leader Dick Armey, seems to be making an attempt at coordinating Tea Party groups, as are Tea Party Patriots Inc., and a few other organizations. But they work more to spread the word than to organize events or bring in volunteers.

Local organizers, Rekstad said, get their policy direction from a variety sources.

"We pick and choose," he said. "If I see something from FreedomWorks that's appropriate for us, I spread that to my Tea Party group."

Historically, Pitney said, political opposition groups are small and spread out, while the party in power is more unified.

"We have one president, but we have have many people who are leaders of the Republican Party and the conservative cause," Pitney said.

In this case, because the Tea Party groups proclaim a kind of Libertarian agenda - with a focus on smaller government - Pitney said the groups are naturally more inclined to want local control.

"To the extent they're Libertarians, that makes (organizing) difficult because Libertarian organization is almost a contradiction in terms," Pitney quipped. "You can't breed an army of fierce individualists."

Although they are philosophically aligned more with Republicans than Democrats, Rekstad said the Tea Party members are conservative, not necessarily Republican.

Some members have serious grievances with Republicans in Congress and with former President George W. Bush, he said.

"There are Republicans who are as crooked as a dog's hind leg," Rekstad said. "Conservatives want smaller government, but a lot of Republicans have become intoxicated with the power of being in Washington or in Sacramento."

But the lack of national hierarchy can lead to a lack of clear focus. At the Redlands Tea Party market night booth, the short video playing on a small monitor was not about health care reform but about a new proposal for limiting carbon dioxide emissions - the cap-and-trade plan.

Schneider said her group decided it should start to focus on issues beyond health care despite concerns their message could lose focus.

OFA, in contrast, seems to have been focused solely on health care since June.

"That's been a big difficulty for us," Schneider said. "But we know (cap and trade) is going to come back up for a vote and we don't want to get caught flat-footed."

That lack of centralization might not be a bad thing, said Matt Schumsky, former executive director of the Republican Party of San Bernardino County.

"The more professional it looks, the more contrived it looks," he said.

"The last thing we want to do is go in there and try to take charge of these groups. We don't want to co-opt the movement."